This Seville startup snaps €1M from DraperB1 and Robin Capital to fix Spain’s broken pension system — TFN

Greater than three million staff in Spain already profit from company pension plans. The overwhelming majority work for giant firms. For the hundreds of thousands employed by small and medium-sized companies, these plans have remained virtually inaccessible: blocked by handbook processes, fragmented administration, and the operational value of working them.

Seville-based Arca Digital was constructed to repair that. The startup has raised €1 million in a seed spherical co-led by Spanish fund DraperB1 and Berlin-based Robin Capital, with further participation from Belgian fund Newschool.vc and a bunch of fintech angels, together with Fernando Cabello-Astolfi, founding father of Aplazame and Devengo, Iván Peña, founding father of Ritmo, and Juan Montero, founding father of Fence.

API-first mannequin eradicating complexity

The founding crew brings direct expertise throughout the sectors that Arca Digital goals to attach. Sergio Rodrigues Valcarce, the CEO, beforehand did VC offers at Telefónica Ventures earlier than dropping out to start out the corporate. Gonzalo Concepción Megía is a former backend engineer at CoverManager, the hospitality tech platform acquired by Zenchef. Adrián Esteban Pagés was Threat Lead for Casavo’s Spanish operations. Two of the three founders are Spanish; one is Portuguese.

The corporate operates as an API-first infrastructure layer between pension fund managers and SMEs, automating the core operations, together with worker enrollment, contributions, withdrawals, and transfers, which have traditionally made these plans too burdensome for smaller firms to supply.

Asset managers achieve a brand new distribution channel with out incurring further operational complexity. HR software program and payroll platforms can embed pension merchandise instantly into their current workflows.

The Spanish pension tech market has to this point produced solely partial options, based on the founders. Conventional managers, resembling Caser Seguros, CaixaBank, BBVA, and Mapfre, have constructed expertise nearly fully round their very own back-office operations, leaving employers to deal with pension plans as an administrative chore and staff largely sidelined from the expertise.

Arca Digital’s pitch addresses all three sides of that downside directly. “Our aggressive edge lies in our potential to unravel the friction factors throughout the complete worth chain, spanning the fund managers, the employers, and the workers, to create a mannequin that’s each worthwhile and really employee-centric,” Valcarce says.

What are the longer term plans?

The corporate plans to consolidate in Spain over the following few years earlier than increasing the mannequin to different Southern European markets dealing with related structural gaps in retirement financial savings protection.

“We’re constructing the go-to ecosystem the place firms can empower their workforce and the place staff can lastly consolidate their fragmented retirement financial savings right into a single, high-tech platform,” concludes Valcarce.

“Retirement plan infrastructure has remained stagnant for many years, leaving hundreds of thousands of staff underserved,” says Robin Haak, Basic Companion at Robin Capital, which is making its first funding in Spain with this deal. It has beforehand backed pension tech firms Penzilla and Xaver in Germany, suggesting a deliberate thesis being constructed throughout European markets the place occupational pension reform is accelerating.

DraperB1, the Valencia-based fund that’s a part of the Draper Enterprise Community, cited the corporate’s early traction. “Their preliminary traction and clear product orientation reinforce our conviction on this younger and impressive crew,” provides Jon Etxeberría, VC Investor at DraperB1.